GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which has clock speeds of 950 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 280 Watts (295%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7990 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 518400 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot (more or less 1069%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 222400 (1069%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 50400 (485%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.